Contradictions

I know I need to write, to let off steam. If I don’t write, then i’ll just be left alone with the thoughts, and the thoughts are crap company. But when I do try to write, to vent and unleash, it becomes too much. As every sentence progresses, the thoughts and memories, feelings and fears progress mutually. But you need to talk, you really do, insists the inner voice of reason. Like a mother, she’s always right. Never dismiss or drown out the mother within your head.

Know this, however, that even following the right path can’t protect you from all obstacles, and hinderances. The right path may well definitely be the right path-far preferable to the dreadful alternate path. A route towards death and destruction, and immesurable harm. No, you do right to follow the voice of the mother of your own self, and take yourself away from those hazardous streets.

It’s like deciding to get a train home, because you’ve had too many drinks. So you leave your car parked up, walk to the station, get on the train. You give yourself a subtle little pat on the back for that ‘sensible decision’ you just made. Reassurance that you’re not irresponsible, but you can still have a good time. However, on the train, you encounter a group of young men, stinking of ethanol and yearning for a fight.

You witness them attempt to mug the only other passenger on board the carriage, besides yourself. So, driven by an uncomfortable yet inspiring surge of Adrenaline, you get up to intervene. But you end up opening quite the can of worms; they turn on you and begin juggling knives, amongst threats and punches, blows knocking you hard, into the window.

You wind up with a hospital stay, and have to learn how to think again, since you obtained a serious concussion, as a side dish to that feast of fear you ate.

How annoying.
When you do ‘the right thing’, the ‘sensible’ and the ‘what i’d tell my children to do’, thing, but you end up paying a punishing price.

That’s what’s cunningly strange to me, still. For some people it might just be black and white- you’re either going to be the bringer of your own death, or you’re not. You will wait for fate to tell you when it stops. If it just so happens to be that tomorrow, I go for a ‘revitalizing’ walk across the Peaks, and end up snatched up by the rapture of a stunning view, I plough forward without caution to ground me, and plunge via a slip against Lucky Heather, over the jaws of the rocks to my death, then fine by me. At least fate was so kind as to bequeath me a quick, surprising death. Among the roots of the Earth, upon which I once stood upright, for my very first time.

When I made the decision to ‘listen to my mother’, for want of a better phrase, and dialled the numbers on my phone for emergency, that miraculous interruption saved my life. I was already half way down the cliff to death, ready and willing to continue falling, falling and falling, until nullified. A flare errupted; I sparked a twisting tree towards the sky, begging for a lifeline. Then I got one.

The damn Crisis team had to see me, once i’d recovered from delirious doses of everything. I was given referrals, to this mental health team, and that mental health team, etc. From the day of the discharge, I have two months to wait it out, until my first appointment. That really is how worrying the state of Mental Health servces in the UK, are, by the way. You ask for help at your GP, when you’re well above that safety line, and then you’re inked into the 16 month waiting list for your initial assessment appointment, with someone vaguely qualified. You deterioate much more quickly than you’d anticipated, and soon your only true reprieve comes by imagining how you’d commit suicide. Then you get too carried away, etc.

Moving on though, and back to the point. I did the right thing, and I protected myself by going to A&E. Now, I find myself ‘sent off sick’ at work, because of course Confidentiality can be broken in such cases of ‘risk to self’. The first two weeks off probably did me good. I went to my allotment everyday, and gardened. I got the beds ready for planting out my seedlings this year, turned over loamy soil and gave the courting birds a very good incentive to visit the place with their ‘dates’ every evening, for the feast of upturned worms i’d incidently offered them up like a buffet.

Now it’s going on too long. It is becoming counter productive, and I am driving myself insane, playing this waiting game, for Occupational Health to chase up reccommendations from my GP, review my ‘fit for work’ status, relay relevant information to my managers, and give the go ahead for me to return to work, and get on with life. Normality is what I need right now, routine and purpose is what I need back in my life. The longer I go without it, the harder it will become to return to this.

I sit here, silently begging for them to hurry up and just let me come back to work. I feel like i’m being punished, although that may sound paradoxical, given i’ve been given this licence to chill, because just doing nothing is completely defeating. Like a short prison sentence.